The Reviews Are In, Again: "The Wolverine" Manages To Win Over Critics

''The Wolverine" is rising from the ashes - both with critics and moviegoers.

It isn’t often that a movie makes a complete turnaround with critics, but apparently, The Wolverine has done just that – clawed its way out of a pit of mediocrity and somehow earned some decidedly positive reviews. Not all of them, of course.

Jackman is one of the best things about the franchise, say most reviewers.

The New York Times’s A. O. Scott praises the film for its keeping to the classic comic book approach of portraying a self-contained adventure. Unlike Iron Man 3 or Man of Steel, Scott says, The Wolverine does not aim for grandeur in its story arc. Instead, it focuses on the intimate experiences and feelings of Logan (the Wolverine, in case you’ve somehow missed the last two decades of pop culture,) made all the more interesting by the fascinating setting that Japan provides.

The Guardian’s review however, is less impressed with the film’s intimacy and character focus. Instead, Peter Bradshaw calls the film out on being synthetic and overproduced, only masquerading as the intimate story it is supposed to be. According to him, the film “does not appear to have been written so much as audience-tested, global-market-researched, greenscreened and CGI-ed to within an inch of its life.”

USA Today’s Brian Truitt seems to have the same critiques and – it’s intimate and different, but that does not always come across in a big budget blockbuster like The Wolverine. He also notes that Japan, as a setting, is perfect for Logan’s evolution, noting that the juxtaposition between the Japanese values of family duty and honor and Logan’s values of, well, none of those things, works well for the intended character story.